Forget the accordion music, the cafés and the immaculate boulevards. There is a dark, uncanny and deeply strange texture pervading modern France—and it’s time to investigate.
Welcome to French Weird, a podcast dedicated to exploring the counterculture, obscure art and bizarre anomalies of contemporary France. Channeling cultural theory, esoterica and the love of a good book this shows investigates what falls through the cracks of mainstream French culture. We are tracking the liminal spaces, the bizarre subcultures and the beautiful freak-outs from the mid-twentieth century to the present day.
What exactly is the French Weird? It is the territory where high philosophy meets the profoundly bizarre. In each episode, we trace the threads of a proudly rational nation simultaneously digesting global weirdness and exporting its own brand of the mysterious.
French Weird explores how France's hidden eccentricities reveal the truths about its politics, literature, culture and - maybe even - identity.
Subscribe now, download, and join us. When the going gets weird, the pros turn French.
For more information, or to get in touch, visit www.frenchweird.com
Psychogeography of the Dead: the Phantoms of Père Lachaise
Beneath the romantic avenues of the world’s most famous necropolis lies a history of decay, ritual and spectacle. In this episode, we step away from the tourist maps and navigate Père Lachaise Cemetery by means of Situationist psychogeography. We trace the origins of the cemetery to the 18th-century Parisian hygiene crisis, exploring how its founders used the exhumed bones of Molière and La Fontaine as a macabre marketing stunt to sell burial plots. From there, we conduct a dérive (a drift) t...
8 Sept 2026
Breton Folk Horror: Fairies, Found Footage and Arthur Machen
In this episode of French Weird we recall holiday travel to Brittany and explore Korriganed, a 2016 French "docufiction" film by Gaël Bizien that plays like a Celtic The Blair Witch Project. With your host Russell Williams, examine the Korrigan myth through Robert Kirk's 17th-century writing on fairy abductions, bizarre pop-culture crossovers like a 2011 Batman comic set in the Paris catacombs and traditional Breton folk tales of tricksters and night dancers. Finally, we embrace into the weir...
24 Aug 2026
The Spy behind The Fly: George Langelaan and David Cronenberg
In this episode of French Weird, host Russell Williams explores the fascinating, myth-laden life and fiction of Franco-British author George Langelaan (1908–1972). Best known as the author of "La Mouche"/"The Fly" (1957), the short story adapted into David Cronenberg’s iconic 1986 body-horror film, Langelaan lived a life that rivalled his most eccentric fiction. We unpack his World War Two career as a Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent, the bizarre claim that he underwent facial r...
11 Aug 2026
The Morning of the Magicians: Fantastic Realism, Alchemy and the Occult
In this episode host Russell Williams thinks about Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier's book Le Matin des magiciens (1960), translated into English as The Morning of the Magicians or The Dawn of Magic. This is a book that Colin Wilson described as "a curious hodgepodge", "a series of wild speculations on magic; alchemy, telepathy, prophecy, strange cults, the Great Pyramid, Hitler's astrologers, the Cabala, flying saucers and a thousand other topics". He's not wrong. For more information, visi...
28 Jul 2026
An Introduction to French Weird
This is where it all begins. Your host, Russell Williams, gives an overview of the sort of things you might expect from French Weird. For more information, visit www.frenchweird.com Forget the accordion music, the cafés and the immaculate boulevards. There is a dark, uncanny and deeply strange texture pervading modern France—and it’s time to investigate. Welcome to French Weird, a podcast dedicated to exploring the counterculture, obscure art and bizarre anomalies of contemporary Franc...
28 Jul 2026
What's Weird about Michel Houellebecq? Lovecraft and beyond
In our first deep exploration, French Weird discovers the unexpected Weird in the work of notorious novelist Michel Houellebecq. Our starting point is his devotion to the work of a certain H. P. Lovecraft. For more information, visit www.frenchweird.com Reading list Houellebecq, Michel. Whatever. Translated by Paul Hammond, Serpent’s Tail, 1998. Houellebecq, Michel. H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life. Translated by Dorna Khazeni, Believer Books, 2005. Houellebecq, Michel. ...
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